Emission zone shouldnt be the issue, it is about the amount of cars and road safety for every user.
Check e.g. the Dutch road design, where many kids ride bikes.
This is already for decades, and has nothing to do with emission zones.
But another road design can also help reducing emissions.
It is about how many people can travel safe, and with big cities, you have to reduce cars to increase the amount of people that can travel safe, like bikes, walking, and public transport.
Road and city design is very important for a livable city.
This. Though it doesn’t stop at road design. You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error. Pedestrians and cyclists are orders of magnitude more vulnerable. Putting much more of the legal burden on car drivers makes them more careful.
The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture. Most car drivers in NL are more mindful of cyclists, because they are cyclists themselves as well.
Circling back to road design. In our mid-sized Dutch city, it’s often faster to go from A to B than by bike than by car because of the excellent biking infrastructure and car-free city center. Everything is designed around cycling, some traffic lights will even give bikes a green light more often when it’s raining.
> car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error
Here in Norway the traffic law states[1] that everyone should be considerate, heedful and careful to avoid harm, and this stands above everything else.
So you can indeed get (partial) blame even if the rest of the rules and regulations say you did nothing wrong.
For example you can't just ram a cyclist or a pedestrian if you have the right of way, but you saw them, or should have seen them, in time to take avoiding action.
Having a quick look at the NYS traffic rules[2] as a semi-random point of comparison, I'm assuming most states have something similar, it does say at the start that "no person shall operate a vehicle in a manner that will endanger any person or property".
This seems to be similar in spirit but not quite the same. I guess I could see the NY courts could find in favor of the driver where the Norwegian courts would not, depending on how they draw the line of endangering.
You can’t really do that without investing heavily in cycling infrastructure like the Dutch do. Not just designing but redesigning roads when accidents happen. A city like Seattle attempts to put the burden on drivers in theory, but crappy road designs (including lots of occluding on street parking) with little to no change when accidents occur often move incident sentiment firmly into the “not much the driver could have done” accident category.
I wonder if the flatness of the country plays a part? I live on a hill and am surrounded by hills. A 3km ride in any direction and back is hard work. Lots of e-bikes here, and lots of mountain biking. But when I suggested getting a bike to my SO for her to get to the closest bus stop faster, the hills were the reason why she’d rather walk.
> The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture.
> You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents
This is all easy to create. It all starts with infrastructure. If you have infrastructure that is safe for bikes, you will create culture. You will also open up extra legal safeguards, but it has to start with infrastructure.
> even when a cyclist or a pedestrian made the error
Surely this depends on how bad the error is?
Suppose you have a cyclist and driver traveling opposite (180 degrees) directions on the same road toward a 4-way stop. The driver stops, looks all ways, notes the cyclist approaching the intersection soon, and enters the intersection. The cyclist then does not stop, does not signal, and turns left (from their perspective) in front of the car which was already in the intersection.
Most of the time, you'd probably need one more failure for that to result in a collision (manufacturer's defect in the accelerator, cyclist slips and falls, ...), but suppose the car did hit the cyclist and none of those other failures were the driver's fault either. In your model, how much legal blame should the driver have?
This also requires said vulnerable participants to stop having a deathwish. I'm scared to hell from cyclists in London, because they are inconsiderate and extremely unpredictable. Try rolling up to a major 4 lane intersection, and you are going to have cyclists materializing out of thin air on both sides.
Furthermore, visibility on UK roads is very poor. You often have very tall hedges lining streets, which means you can't see more than a few meters until the very last moment.
You'd need to basically rip up the entire city and rebuild it from scratch, and then replace all the inhabitants with rational actors. It's simply not going to happen otherwise.
Yes, but until the ICE is gone, emissions and car flow is linked.
An ultra-low emission-zone limits car flow by only allowing a smaller subset of cars to pass. A restriction on car flow reduces emission by allowing fewer emitters.
A low-emission zone can be a way to gradually reduce car traffic, and at the end it may be low enough that you can limit car traffic to residents only, or even no one at all.
Sorry but it's simply to put the rich in power to drive their new EV SUVs while limiting people with less money from driving their own car. People who have 4 kids: "sorry your Citroen is not enough. Buy yourself an ID Buzz we don't care."
Being from Sweden that is how I measured safety for a large part of my adult life. How safe I felt in a new area directly depended on how far I could walk with my dog without crossing car traffic.
In Malmö for example I could walk for 2 hours and only cross 2 roads. Because the bicycle network is so developed they have underpasses for bikes that us pedestrians can use.
Then I lived in the balkans and saw the stark contrast.
But there's no point in shoving this down American's throats because their whole country is far too vast for European design. They need to fill it up with people for a few hundred years like Europe before they will be forced to implement good street design.
> their whole country is far too vast for European design.
That's not really true though. There is no particular reason to think of the vast almost empty spaces when thinking about urban and suburban spaces. There are plenty of walkable towns in the US, the problem is that there are vastly more towns that are not. I spent quite a lot of time in Raleigh NC and the surroundings in the 1990s and early 2000s and walked and cycled everywhere. There were a lot more roads to cross than in Malmö of course but it was still quite reasonable.
One need not be forced to implement good urban design, one merely needs to want it.
And I would also say that most towns in Sweden are not really very typical of European towns, even Norway next (where I live) is different. Sweden has a lot more space available than most European countries and in fact has an average population density (25/km2) lower than that of the US (33/km2).
It is worth noting that London has ~80% of the population of the Netherlands but is some 5 times smaller. That's very much apples to oranges.
Stricter low-emission zones result in fewer cars in the short term (because some subset of the existing cars no longer enter). In the longer term they might result in fewer cars because the initial car reduction brings other benefits (such as safer cycling/playing/whatevering and reduced congestion which benefits public transport).
This is not false, but it isn't either completely true!
Those pesky car commuters keep driving because they have yet to be offered a solution that decreases the only metric every commuter is interested in: clock time from door to door.
Clock time is not one metric. The metric I care about more, as a users of a car, bike, rental scooter, bus, and subway, is the variance in door-to-door time.
If it takes less 80% of the time but 20% of the time I'm 20 minutes late, I won't use public transport. (I'm not talking about rare occurrences, I'm talking about once a week on a random day being late.)
I also live in a very hot city with 5 months of summer a year, so walking distances and A/C are also a critical factor.
Given the challenges of enforcing strict regulations on emissions, could a market-based approach like a carbon tax be a more effective deterrent for high-emission vehicles and corporate practices?
My 2c as a local: a significant issue with any discussion of this is that people don't really have a good handle on the actual statistics of who drives in London.
It cuts across every demographic. Under 25k household income - a good 40-50% of households have a car. Housing estates - tons of cars. Well off - almost everyone.
It mostly comes down to whether someone has a need (e.g. has children, fairly mobile in their job, has family outside of town, enjoys going on road trips etc) and actually wants to pay for it rather than anything else.
In addition to that, a bunch of stuff happened basically at the same time. We got ULEZ, we got a ton of low traffic neighbourhoods (e.g. streets where cars are not allowed at certain times of day regardless of emissions), we had COVID meaning that habits and demographics changed, we had Brexit which probably had some minor effect, etc. All of that happened within about 5 years and I don't think you can isolate any of them.
I don't really find most discussions about it interesting as a result of all of the above - it usually just ends up with someone trying to find evidence for their pre-existing position rather than anything that feels actually scientific, unfortunately.
My 2c as a local: I live in zone 2 and at least anecdotally I am in disagreement with your point here. So I looked it up in your link from TfL - "There are 2.56m cars licensed in London. This equates to an average of 0.3 cars per adult. In total, 46 per cent of households do not have a car, 40 per cent have one car and 12 per cent have two or more cars, with very few households owning more than two cars."
This is the same as your stated numbers, but framed in a substantially different way. In addition I suspect this is dominated by the outer boroughs; maybe one or two of my 20+ coworkers who live in zones 1-3 have a car, it's more once you get z4+.
By Zone 5 you're basically almost back to the world of infrequent bus services and out-of-town supermarkets so it's a lot more understandable why you need a car.
Anecdotal sample from my village just outside Zone 6 (but inside M25): every single one of my neighbours has 2 cars, some have 3 (or 4). Basically every adult or young-adult member of the household who has to go somewhere on their own has a car. You could argue that they don't need that many, but take it this way: the reliability of the UK train network has become absolutely disgraceful. They are either on strike, or if they are not striking, then they are doing engineering works, and if neither of those are happening, then there is a major disruption. This means that in the last 6 months, I think there have been 2-3 weeks perhaps where the connection into London was reliable.
Exactly. Came here to say the same thing. I live in zone 2 and I'd say that majority of the households don't own a car because they don't need one. We only got a car after we had kids and used to Uber around when we needed a car, a lot cheaper than full time car ownership.
What annoys me about this is the assumption that ULEZ means people can't drive any more.
Every single person with a car today can continue to drive under ULEZ without paying the ULEZ fee.
They just need to have a car that isn't high emissions. They can pay to drive a non-compliant car, or they can change car to something that is compliant, and don't pay the charge. That's it.
To facilitate that, the taxpayer through the ULEZ scrappage scheme offered £2,000 even if the car was not worth anything close to that value. I've seen people get £2k for vehicles that frankly weren't worth half that.
There are plenty of vehicles available for not much more money that are ULEZ-compliant.
I think the fact this happened at a similar time when we were exposed to chatter of "government interference" from Europe (Brexit), or Whitehall (Covid lockdowns), didn't help, but the language I hear some people using is insane - we're paying for the same level of personal protection for the Mayor as for the PM because of the number of death threats he gets.
I definite;y agree very little of the debate feels scientific.
I wish the article stated if the amount of cars traveling in the zone remained the same.
I would think it probably greatly reduced the amount of traffic in that area, which all around just makes for a more pleasant experience being a pedestrian, biker, or scooterer.
Regardless, I think this is awesome and wish it could be tried in the United States. Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development.
I haven't really noticed any difference in traffic levels. It dipped a bit during COVID for obvious reasons and now it's back to how it was for the most part.
https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 has a good chart - 20 billion vehicle miles to 19 billion. Interestingly from the chart, local traffic stayed about the same whilst main roads seem to have lost a little.
The ULEZ zone is now basically all of the city, it doesn't quite go to the M25 (motorway ring road) but anywhere that a tourist would even remotely think of as being London is well inside it.
> Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development
Add to that growing up with a dog or cat (implies parents are well off enough to take care of said animal when the kid is a kid and spaces being responsible) and living when they can play in wild spaces (not manicured lawns), plant flowers, veg, etc. learn getting stung suks but usually not fatal. A big plus is being around livestock and as the kids mature, having an opportunity to take care of said livestock (4H program)
> I wish the article stated if the amount of cars traveling in the zone remained the same.
Anecdotally, traffic is worse than ever, school drop off and pickup times are particularly bad. I have on occasion been stuck in school run traffic for literally hours going <5km around Putney / Clapham.
Definitely better than it was 10 years ago. I've visited London once every 1-6 months for the past 10-15 years, and have noted a change. It's still not amazing, though - honestly, if they were to aggressively disincentivize diesel in small cars, I feel like everything would be fine. Subjectively, a day in London seems akin to spending a few hours with a 50cm3 2-stroke chainsaw, or an hour on an old diesel excavator. I do not feel the same way about most US cities, nor even most cities in mainland Europe.
You know, I think that has. I remember this happening, but the recent years I’ve been into London on occasion, this doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.
Some argue that these coarse particles are less damaging for your health than the finer particles we are exposed to today, even if you cannot see them settling as dirt.
Although on that part tire abrasion is probably even a larger factor than exhaust particles, even if it doesn't smell as badly. Some say the factor is beyond 1000x for tire abrasions. Info is hard here, because many sources have their own ball in the game.
But cars today are significantly more heavy, which increases these abrasions nonlinearly.
Yes as long as you stay off the deeper parts of tube, e.g the Northern Line. One of London’s biggest sources of particulate pollution is now tube train brake pads
I visit Londen about once a year and during my last visit I noticed the air quality was better than the year before. Pure anecdotal. But I notice these things because of my bad longs.
You want more active kids in the US? This is easy. Every neighborhood needs to have multiple adjacent lots with no construction on it. Aka, a park of sorts. It doesn't need to have slides, or games, or any of that other stuff. It just needs to be an open space with enough room that groups of kids can go and engage in outdoor activities without the need to be constantly monitored by adults. That's it.
They can play football or baseball or soccer or frisbee or tag. Doesn't matter. What matters is that you give them the room and let them do their own thing. Not only would this help them be more active, but it'd help them socialize a great deal more than they normally do.
Easiest would be to forbid cars access to the school. All over the world kids are walking to school and when I talk to US people I hear some of them are even prevented from letting their kids walking to school. Apparently some of them introduced rules out of the jealousy of the fat parents that don't want to see healthy kids walking past their diabetic ones and enter the school while they are still waiting in line in their cars.
My neighborhood has a big city park just across the street from our house, with a lot of free / empty space. One observation: The kids are too busy to go there, as they're kept occupied by homework and organized extracurriculars.
We're seeing (and contributing to, if I'm honest) this parenting mindset that you have to keep kids busy to "keep them out of trouble", thus the schedules get loaded up with organized activities. At least one outcome is that we reached a point where basically none of my kids friends were ever around for just... play. Then our kids are bored, and we'd like them to be doing something with others too, and soon we're signing up them up for activities and the cycle perpetuates.
Sounds great, but is really about the minimum that needs to be done. Active kids is much more than allowing them access to an "activity zone"; it's about allowing kids and families to build activity into their normal life, which in practice means active transport and walkable/cyclable cities.
The biggest challenge for this is the risk of cars. Many suburbs don’t have sidewalks, and the sprawl often means a substantial walk. That leads to an arms race of sorts: people who think it’s too dangerous drive, making it more dangerous for everyone else and conditioning everyone to think a distance greater than the walk from the parking lot is an unreasonable level of physical exertion.
Given that cars are a leading cause of death for children past age 5, I can’t completely blame the parents for this, either – poor design is a societal failure and they’re mostly responding to the incentives set up half a century ago.
I’m not sure what you mean by “without the need to be monitored by adults.” A friend of mine from college was prosecuted for letting her kids play alone in the park across the street. Leaving kids alone outside in a US city park is child endangerment, literally.
That’s pretty startling to hear. As a child growing up in a london suburb we would disappear for hours to the local park and environs. Playing cricket, other games, or just roaming around. About the only supervision was if the dog came too.
What really endangers the development of children is the lack of adult-free outdoor play. They need to learn by themselves to assess risks and solve conflicts without any adult supervision.
Wow, sounds like a great idea but how is there a way for me to take financial gain from it? And can we protect them from active shooters in the area? Sounds like it should be under constant monitoring from the police.
This is good, but I wouldn't classify it as surprising - urbanist advocates have been going on about this for years and years. Remove the dangerous and unpleasant elements from the streetscape (cars) and active transportation flourishes (walking, biking, transit).
Brussels is planning to go EV only by 2035. At this point, there is alost no significant investments in charging capacity. Even worse, landlords are refusing to install charge points in basement garages, presumably because of insurance costs.
I'm not against EV at all, even though it is overhyped on the one side and demonized on the other. What bothers me is the hypocrisy in messaging. You can not pretend going full EV in 10 years and not be on a never befote seen giant grid replacement right now.
So what is it? Are you going to make car ownership in the city a 1% privilege? Will not much change but will everybody have to pay the exemption fee (oh yes, that exists)?
Both can be an acceptable position, just don't pretend.
It is true that politicians are not pushing charging infrastructure sufficiently - which they absolutely could, seeing they push other ridiculous and costly requirements like absurd parking space allocations - and that this needs to change. This is unfortunately common in politics. It is far, far cheaper to say things than to do things, and if they can both look good for the people that care about this, and avoid risking annoying anyone that don't care by making proposals they could protest over, then it that ends up being a win-win for them. Politics is unfortunately mainly PR these days.
But the reason EVs need to be "overhyped" is because ICE's are not sufficiently demonized to show their true gap. We keep turning our blind eye to ICE's because it is more convenient, and if we keep pretending ICE's are "maybe not great but okay", then EVs have to look ridiculously amazing to show their gap and be worth the infrastructure investment.
In reality, EVs are the "okay-ish" baseline, and ICE's should be banished all the way back to the 17th century for anything but very specific commercial applications that currently have no suitable replacement.
Yeah I'm fairly sure both politicians and car manufacturers are dialing back on their EV push; governments' subsidy pots are emptied out, there's no healthy secondhand market yet, and there's heavy competition and/or market dominance (including raw materials and batteries, but also government-assisted low prices) from China. I think that's got politicians nervous.
When I stayed in London half a year ago, we overnighted in the Limehouse area, at the edge / outside of the ULEZ.
I can tell from experience there is a big difference in the air. In that area it smelled like exhaust and smog, while the center had no such thing.
When I reflect on it, I feel that the less affluent areas have been left out to dry / rot in the exhaust. While the upper class city center is now pristine.
The ULEZ has covered the entirety of London, including Limehouse, for more than a year.
The outer zones of the city are definitely dirtier, but it has less to do with ULEZ and more to do with practical travel times. Despite great public transport, getting between the spokes of the wheel is still a challenge, so people who don’t work in the city centre often drive. The further out you go, the more people like that there are.
Limehouse is now far inside the current ULEZ boundary.
While there are small upper-class enclaves in the city center, the most affluent areas of London are the outer boroughs. You can this reflected in electoral maps as well, where the center is mostly Labour, while the outer boroughs have typically voted more rightwing.
ULEZ has expanded outward step by step, but the strongest resistance to further expansion has come from the more affluent areas further out.
Left/right politics, high/low income and high/low status don't map neatly onto London's demography, and haven't since Tony Blair, New Labour and "champagne socialism".
Outer and anti-ULEZ right-wing areas - Bexley, Romford, Welling, Uxbridge - might be more affluent than deprived inner-city parts, but they're a lot less affluent (as well as far less educated) than the professional-class areas of the inner city, which these days seems to span all the way from Muswell Hill down to Tooting.
Tory/rightwing votes used to be a thing for rich people who wanted to keep their winnings for themselves, pay less tax and/or encourage the less successful to work harder and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The modern tory party seems to be mostly for losers, racists and grumpy pensioners who want to blame all their problems on immigrants, LGBTQ+ and "the woke".
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The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture. Most car drivers in NL are more mindful of cyclists, because they are cyclists themselves as well.
Circling back to road design. In our mid-sized Dutch city, it’s often faster to go from A to B than by bike than by car because of the excellent biking infrastructure and car-free city center. Everything is designed around cycling, some traffic lights will even give bikes a green light more often when it’s raining.
Here in Norway the traffic law states[1] that everyone should be considerate, heedful and careful to avoid harm, and this stands above everything else.
So you can indeed get (partial) blame even if the rest of the rules and regulations say you did nothing wrong.
For example you can't just ram a cyclist or a pedestrian if you have the right of way, but you saw them, or should have seen them, in time to take avoiding action.
Having a quick look at the NYS traffic rules[2] as a semi-random point of comparison, I'm assuming most states have something similar, it does say at the start that "no person shall operate a vehicle in a manner that will endanger any person or property".
This seems to be similar in spirit but not quite the same. I guess I could see the NY courts could find in favor of the driver where the Norwegian courts would not, depending on how they draw the line of endangering.
[1]: https://lovdata.no/lov/1965-06-18-4/§3
[2]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/trafrule.pdf
> You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents
This is all easy to create. It all starts with infrastructure. If you have infrastructure that is safe for bikes, you will create culture. You will also open up extra legal safeguards, but it has to start with infrastructure.
Surely this depends on how bad the error is?
Suppose you have a cyclist and driver traveling opposite (180 degrees) directions on the same road toward a 4-way stop. The driver stops, looks all ways, notes the cyclist approaching the intersection soon, and enters the intersection. The cyclist then does not stop, does not signal, and turns left (from their perspective) in front of the car which was already in the intersection.
Most of the time, you'd probably need one more failure for that to result in a collision (manufacturer's defect in the accelerator, cyclist slips and falls, ...), but suppose the car did hit the cyclist and none of those other failures were the driver's fault either. In your model, how much legal blame should the driver have?
Furthermore, visibility on UK roads is very poor. You often have very tall hedges lining streets, which means you can't see more than a few meters until the very last moment.
You'd need to basically rip up the entire city and rebuild it from scratch, and then replace all the inhabitants with rational actors. It's simply not going to happen otherwise.
An ultra-low emission-zone limits car flow by only allowing a smaller subset of cars to pass. A restriction on car flow reduces emission by allowing fewer emitters.
A low-emission zone can be a way to gradually reduce car traffic, and at the end it may be low enough that you can limit car traffic to residents only, or even no one at all.
In Malmö for example I could walk for 2 hours and only cross 2 roads. Because the bicycle network is so developed they have underpasses for bikes that us pedestrians can use.
Then I lived in the balkans and saw the stark contrast.
But there's no point in shoving this down American's throats because their whole country is far too vast for European design. They need to fill it up with people for a few hundred years like Europe before they will be forced to implement good street design.
That's not really true though. There is no particular reason to think of the vast almost empty spaces when thinking about urban and suburban spaces. There are plenty of walkable towns in the US, the problem is that there are vastly more towns that are not. I spent quite a lot of time in Raleigh NC and the surroundings in the 1990s and early 2000s and walked and cycled everywhere. There were a lot more roads to cross than in Malmö of course but it was still quite reasonable.
One need not be forced to implement good urban design, one merely needs to want it.
And I would also say that most towns in Sweden are not really very typical of European towns, even Norway next (where I live) is different. Sweden has a lot more space available than most European countries and in fact has an average population density (25/km2) lower than that of the US (33/km2).
Underpasses are usually a detour for pedestrians. IMO they're hostile car-centric design.
Stricter low-emission zones result in fewer cars in the short term (because some subset of the existing cars no longer enter). In the longer term they might result in fewer cars because the initial car reduction brings other benefits (such as safer cycling/playing/whatevering and reduced congestion which benefits public transport).
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This is not false, but it isn't either completely true!
Those pesky car commuters keep driving because they have yet to be offered a solution that decreases the only metric every commuter is interested in: clock time from door to door.
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If it takes less 80% of the time but 20% of the time I'm 20 minutes late, I won't use public transport. (I'm not talking about rare occurrences, I'm talking about once a week on a random day being late.)
I also live in a very hot city with 5 months of summer a year, so walking distances and A/C are also a critical factor.
Channel detailing Dutch (and other places') infrastructure design.
Dead Comment
It cuts across every demographic. Under 25k household income - a good 40-50% of households have a car. Housing estates - tons of cars. Well off - almost everyone.
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-a...
It mostly comes down to whether someone has a need (e.g. has children, fairly mobile in their job, has family outside of town, enjoys going on road trips etc) and actually wants to pay for it rather than anything else.
In addition to that, a bunch of stuff happened basically at the same time. We got ULEZ, we got a ton of low traffic neighbourhoods (e.g. streets where cars are not allowed at certain times of day regardless of emissions), we had COVID meaning that habits and demographics changed, we had Brexit which probably had some minor effect, etc. All of that happened within about 5 years and I don't think you can isolate any of them.
I don't really find most discussions about it interesting as a result of all of the above - it usually just ends up with someone trying to find evidence for their pre-existing position rather than anything that feels actually scientific, unfortunately.
This is the same as your stated numbers, but framed in a substantially different way. In addition I suspect this is dominated by the outer boroughs; maybe one or two of my 20+ coworkers who live in zones 1-3 have a car, it's more once you get z4+.
Unless you have a car, you are completely hosed.
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I just hope it gains enough inertia so that a theoretical future populist Mayor cant just sweep it aside.
Did they not realise that's literally the whole point?
Every single person with a car today can continue to drive under ULEZ without paying the ULEZ fee.
They just need to have a car that isn't high emissions. They can pay to drive a non-compliant car, or they can change car to something that is compliant, and don't pay the charge. That's it.
To facilitate that, the taxpayer through the ULEZ scrappage scheme offered £2,000 even if the car was not worth anything close to that value. I've seen people get £2k for vehicles that frankly weren't worth half that.
There are plenty of vehicles available for not much more money that are ULEZ-compliant.
I think the fact this happened at a similar time when we were exposed to chatter of "government interference" from Europe (Brexit), or Whitehall (Covid lockdowns), didn't help, but the language I hear some people using is insane - we're paying for the same level of personal protection for the Mayor as for the PM because of the number of death threats he gets.
I definite;y agree very little of the debate feels scientific.
I would think it probably greatly reduced the amount of traffic in that area, which all around just makes for a more pleasant experience being a pedestrian, biker, or scooterer.
Regardless, I think this is awesome and wish it could be tried in the United States. Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development.
https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 has a good chart - 20 billion vehicle miles to 19 billion. Interestingly from the chart, local traffic stayed about the same whilst main roads seem to have lost a little.
The ULEZ zone is now basically all of the city, it doesn't quite go to the M25 (motorway ring road) but anywhere that a tourist would even remotely think of as being London is well inside it.
Add to that growing up with a dog or cat (implies parents are well off enough to take care of said animal when the kid is a kid and spaces being responsible) and living when they can play in wild spaces (not manicured lawns), plant flowers, veg, etc. learn getting stung suks but usually not fatal. A big plus is being around livestock and as the kids mature, having an opportunity to take care of said livestock (4H program)
Anecdotally, traffic is worse than ever, school drop off and pickup times are particularly bad. I have on occasion been stuck in school run traffic for literally hours going <5km around Putney / Clapham.
Has that changed?
Although on that part tire abrasion is probably even a larger factor than exhaust particles, even if it doesn't smell as badly. Some say the factor is beyond 1000x for tire abrasions. Info is hard here, because many sources have their own ball in the game.
But cars today are significantly more heavy, which increases these abrasions nonlinearly.
(I live in the countryside so I notice air quality quite a bit when visiting. I rarely have to blow my nose at home)
They can play football or baseball or soccer or frisbee or tag. Doesn't matter. What matters is that you give them the room and let them do their own thing. Not only would this help them be more active, but it'd help them socialize a great deal more than they normally do.
Given that cars are a leading cause of death for children past age 5, I can’t completely blame the parents for this, either – poor design is a societal failure and they’re mostly responding to the incentives set up half a century ago.
/s
I'm not against EV at all, even though it is overhyped on the one side and demonized on the other. What bothers me is the hypocrisy in messaging. You can not pretend going full EV in 10 years and not be on a never befote seen giant grid replacement right now.
So what is it? Are you going to make car ownership in the city a 1% privilege? Will not much change but will everybody have to pay the exemption fee (oh yes, that exists)?
Both can be an acceptable position, just don't pretend.
But the reason EVs need to be "overhyped" is because ICE's are not sufficiently demonized to show their true gap. We keep turning our blind eye to ICE's because it is more convenient, and if we keep pretending ICE's are "maybe not great but okay", then EVs have to look ridiculously amazing to show their gap and be worth the infrastructure investment.
In reality, EVs are the "okay-ish" baseline, and ICE's should be banished all the way back to the 17th century for anything but very specific commercial applications that currently have no suitable replacement.
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News from Germany is that VW is closing down its German car factories. That's a huge setback. https://www.ft.com/content/f32c172b-d5e9-4397-8831-c61987380...
I can tell from experience there is a big difference in the air. In that area it smelled like exhaust and smog, while the center had no such thing.
When I reflect on it, I feel that the less affluent areas have been left out to dry / rot in the exhaust. While the upper class city center is now pristine.
The outer zones of the city are definitely dirtier, but it has less to do with ULEZ and more to do with practical travel times. Despite great public transport, getting between the spokes of the wheel is still a challenge, so people who don’t work in the city centre often drive. The further out you go, the more people like that there are.
While there are small upper-class enclaves in the city center, the most affluent areas of London are the outer boroughs. You can this reflected in electoral maps as well, where the center is mostly Labour, while the outer boroughs have typically voted more rightwing.
ULEZ has expanded outward step by step, but the strongest resistance to further expansion has come from the more affluent areas further out.
Low income vote Tory and Farage
Is this why housing is more expensive in central London?
Outer and anti-ULEZ right-wing areas - Bexley, Romford, Welling, Uxbridge - might be more affluent than deprived inner-city parts, but they're a lot less affluent (as well as far less educated) than the professional-class areas of the inner city, which these days seems to span all the way from Muswell Hill down to Tooting.
Tory/rightwing votes used to be a thing for rich people who wanted to keep their winnings for themselves, pay less tax and/or encourage the less successful to work harder and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The modern tory party seems to be mostly for losers, racists and grumpy pensioners who want to blame all their problems on immigrants, LGBTQ+ and "the woke".